Vail & Summit County
AvalancheJason Konigsberg · Mar 4, 2019 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
Winds increased significantly around noon with intense wind loading above treeline. Prior to that winds were calm. Skies were mostly clear with thicker clouds off in the distance. Warm temperatures with the snow surface on southerly aspects up to 12k feet becoming moist.
Snowpack
No cracking collapsing or signs of instability on slopes that I traveled. The storm slab seems well bonded to older layers below and it is hard to find instability within the slab. Right side up and up to pencil hard towards the bottom of the new snow which encompasses the last 4 days. I went to ski down a southeast aspect and came to a dead stop as moist snow immediately glopped onto my skis. This was at 12k feet. I bootpacked down a hundred feet and dug down to find our old melt freeze crust with facets beneath still propagating fractures in extended column tests. The block slid easily off the column after 24 taps. This would be a sudden planar or Q1 fracture if we were to rate ECTs. One of the cleanest, planar fractures I have seen this season.
Avalanche
This was the only large avalanche I saw with good views of the surrounding mountains. Natural avalanche activity wasn't widespread on March 3rd but where the snowpack was overloaded avalanches were very large. Almost all avalanches that we have recorded so far in Summit County were D2.5 or bigger and broke on old snow layers. There was almost no small avalanches and no avalanches that broke just within storm snow.